“It's what I got a vocation for,” James said. “I can tell.”
“A vocation. My, my.”
Emily Gruber returned with my beer. She had poured it into a tall glass and it was on a tray beside a smaller glass of Diet Pepsi. She offered my beer with a little bow and did the same with the soft drink for James.
“My husband likes his supper soon as he comes in from the plant, Mr. Crang,” Emily said. “I'll be in the kitchen if you want anything.”
She waited until I tasted the beer.
“Very refreshing, Mrs. Gruber,” I said.
Emily dimpled her face and went back to the kitchen.
“So?” James Turkin said. “You telling the probation officer or what?”
I said, “The proposition I've got for you, I don't think your probation officer wants to hear about.”
“Yeah? For me? What kind of proposition?”
“I hire you to open a few doors that the owner prefers to keep shut.”
“You want me to get inside a place and steal stuff?” James asked. His voice lost some of its flatness. It sounded as close as James Turkin could approach to incredulity.
“Just get inside,” I said. “No stealing.”
James contemplated his Pepsi.
“You trying to set me up?” he said.
“Paying job, James,” I said. “One hundred dollars for a night's employment. I'll lead you to the building, you apply your arts to guide another gentleman and me past its locks and alarms.”
“It's against the law.”
“Exactly why I thought of you.”
James wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and rubbed the hand against the front of his Home Hardware shirt. It left a small, damp smear.
“One hundred dollars?” he said.
“Cash money,” I said. I'd finished half of the beer. It tasted like Lifebuoy.
“When?” James asked.
“It has to be after midnight,” I said, “and it has to be soon, probably tomorrow night.”
“I'd want to look at the place first, whatever it is, an office building you're talking about?”
“Small office in the suburbs,” I said. “Got a fence around it, gate with a padlock I think. Don't know about the door into the building. I haven't been that close.”
“I need to see everything,” James said. He put the glass of Pepsi on an end table beside the chair with the floral pattern and shoved himself forward to the edge of the chair. “Wire fence, padlock, all that, I got to see for myself.”
“Case the joint.”
“Huh?” James obviously hadn't seen enough Edward G. Robinson movies.
“I'll drive you out after dark tonight,” I said. “What's good? Ten o'clock?”
James and I arranged to meet up the street at the corner of Gerrard and Sackville. I told him I'd be in a white Volks convertible.
“What's this deal about?” James asked.
“It's about one hundred dollars,” I said. “That's all you need to know.”
Emily Gruber came into the living room from the kitchen. She had put on a frilly blue apron over her white dress and was carrying an unopened bottle of beer and a bottle opener. The beer was Miller Lite. Could have fooled me. I declined the second beer, and after a friendly handshake, she instructed James to see me to the door.
“How did your sister acquire the good manners?” I asked James when we were on the porch.
He said, “Emily's weird, all right.”
I drove home and ate two ham sandwiches with a shot of vodka. Was I corrupting a teenager's morals? Hardly. James Turkin's morals had found their home in a nether region long before I appeared on his scene. If he was hell-bent on a life of crime, better he should perform in a worthy cause. Getting Harry Hein and me into Ace Disposal's offices qualified as a worthy cause in my book. Nothing I or a probation officer could say would dissuade James from exploring the career option of breaking and entering. It would take a couple of stretches in prison to cure him of his predilections, and in the meantime, as long as he was operating under my thoughtful supervision, he had a better chance of avoiding arrest. I poured another shot of vodka and admired my gift for rationalizing awkward moral dilemmas.
Me and Immanuel Kant.
I
LEFT EARLY
enough to drop in on Annie for an unannounced visit before my date with James. Annie's apartment was five blocks due north of the Gruber homestead. The five blocks defined the distance from chic Cabbagetown to glum Regent Park. Something like the difference between the two Germanys. Without the Wall.
“Guess who's come to dinner?” Annie said.
She was whispering in the hallway outside her apartment door. I'd knocked first. Always the gent.
I said, “Not Richard Gere.”
“If it was him,” Annie said, “it'd be for naked lunch.”
From where I was standing, I couldn't see into the apartment. Blue air drifted out. Whoever was inside was a heavy smoker.
“The shade of Ed Murrow?” I said.
“Alice Brackley,” Annie whispered. “She phoned this afternoon. I asked her over.”
Alice was sitting behind a bottle of Cutty Sark at the table in the front window. Annie must have made a rush trip to the liquor store on Parliament Street. Scotch wasn't a staple in her booze cabinet. Empty plates had been shoved to the end of the table. They'd eaten chicken breasts with some kind of tomato sauce. My stomach lurched in envy. Alice was using one of Annie's cobalt-blue soup bowls for an ashtray.
“Am I trespassing on your time with Annie, Mr. Crang?” Alice asked me. She was wearing her gold and a smile that anybody would call winning.
“It's me who's making the surprise visit, Ms. Brackley,” I said. “Nice to see you.”
“Nice?”
“Honest.”
Alice looked at ease. Maybe the Scotch. Maybe the absence of Charles Grimaldi.
Annie said to me, “We've been talking more movies.”
Annie looked at ease too. With her, I knew it had nothing to do with Grimaldi or Scotch. She was drinking red wine sparingly.
“And talking about you, Mr. Crang,” Alice Brackley said.
“Alice was frank,” Annie said, again to me. “She wanted to know if she could trust you.”
“With what?” I asked.
I meant the question for Alice. She didn't answer directly. She said, “The impression you made at La Serre, Mr. Crang, was mixed.”
“Smiling Charlie wouldn't say so,” I said.
“I wasn't speaking for Charles,” Alice said.
“He thought you were a smarty-pants,” Annie said. “I didn't blame him.”
Annie's tone was light, but she was letting me know there was a point to be made in the room.
“Whose side you on?” I said to her.
My tone matched Annie's for lightness, but I was letting her know I wanted someone in the room to get on with the point.
“I hope I'm not presuming too much,” Annie said, turning from me to Alice and back to me, “but I think Alice might want to consult you, Crang.”
“Is that what the thing about trust is all about?” I said.
Annie had candles on the table. In their glow, Alice's face looked soft and rosy. She reached into a bowl of ice, dropped three cubes in her glass, and poured Cutty Sark on top. Soft and rosy and tiddly. On her at that moment it wasn't a bad combination.
“Do you know anything about the disposal business, Mr. Crang?” Alice asked.
“I'm picking up on it fast.”
“In disposal,” Alice said, “there's no quarter given.”
“Especially tough for a woman, I'd imagine.”
“It's sexist,” Alice said, “but so are many businesses.”
“Many businesses aren't also crooked.”
“Crang,” Annie said, “you're going too fast.”
Alice said, “One takes the edge where it's offered. That's what I've learned at Ace.”
It was Alice's dance. I'd follow her lead. But as tangos went, it was mighty leisurely. I was sure to step on her toes before we got off the dance floor. Either that or I'd OD on my own metaphors.
“What else have you learned at Ace?” I asked Alice.
“The president's office is the place where you find the only real satisfaction,” she said.
Where was the woman going with this line of palaver? I knew where I should be going. My watch said eight minutes to ten. Eight minutes until my assignation with James Turkin.
“What you just said,” I said, “sounds like something they teach at the Harvard Business School.”
“Mr. Crang, I'm in the business world,” Alice said. “I know where power resides.”
“And how it's wielded?”
“Sometimes a line is crossed,” Alice said.
Alice may have expected me to understand. Rosy in the candlelight, safe in Annie's company, comfortable in the Scotch. I couldn't be sure whether she wanted to spill some beans or was merely high and loose on the ambience and the liquor. It might take another hour to find out. I made a swift weighing of priorities. My meeting with James won out.
“Let's get together, Ms. Brackley,” I said. “Take lunch. Have your machine call my machine. Pencil in a date. All those other things you guys do in the executive suite.”
“Don't pay attention to the flip stuff, Alice,” Annie said to Ms. Brackley. “You can rely on Crang.”
“I'll be in contact,” Alice said to me.
“But will we touch base?”
Annie went to the door with me.
“You shouldn't tease the woman,” she said in the hall. She was whispering again. “I think Alice might be on the verge of saying something important.”
“She's treating it like the Geneva arms talks,” I said. “We don't have the space for prolonged negotiations and other tap dances.”
“Well,” Annie said, looking back into the apartment, “she's welcome to stay here and talk for as long as she wants.”
“Keep her mainlining the Cutty.”
“Crang, I'm not going to pump the woman. Just lend an ear to someone who's got problems.”
“Come up with deep-throat material,” I said, “and I'll stick the bottle of Scotch on my expense account.”
“That's my guy. All heart.”
I kissed Annie on both cheeks, went down to the Volks, and drove around the corner to Sackville and Gerrard. James was waiting in front of a variety store. He had on a long-sleeved black shirt and black jeans.
I said, “I like a man who dresses for the occasion. Except, James, tonight isn't the occasion.”
“I know what I'm doing,” James said.
He was carrying a cloth whisky bag. I hesitated to ask what was in it. It wouldn't be whisky.
I went out the Queen Elizabeth Way with the top down on the Volks, cut north at Kipling Avenue, and drove past the muffler outlets and body shops to Ace Disposal's quarters. A bright spotlight illuminated the sign at the front, and all the lights inside the one-storey office building had been left on. There wasn't an indication of human activity on the premises. I pulled into the parking lot on the south side of the bar and restaurant across the street. The lot was three-quarters full, and sounds of happy revelry came from inside the club. The exotic dancers who were its advertised feature must have been in full terpsichorean flight. Or maybe the food was just awfully good.
“That the place over there?” James said. He was twisting around in the front seat looking at the Ace building. “Can't see much from here.”
Two cars came up the street and parked in the lot. Three young guys in T-shirts that read “University of Toronto Engineering” piled out of one car and a man in a business suit got out of the other. They went into the club. It was called the Majestic. “No G-Strings,” a hand-painted sign over the door proclaimed.
“We'll get a table inside that looks out on the street,” I said. “Less conspicuous than the parking lot.”
We entered the Majestic. It was crowded and smoky and dark. Loud rock music came from two speakers mounted on the stage that ran along most of the back wall. There were stand-up bars on either side of the stage, and tables with customers at them spread across the floor in front of it. Pink lights were directed at the stage. A young woman danced in the lights. She wasn't wearing a G-string or anything else.
Two or three of the tables at the back of the room were empty, and James and I sat at one that was up against a window. A waitress asked what it'd be. She was wearing high heels and a shortie jacket that proper girls put on only at bedtime. James asked for a Coke and I ordered vodka. When the waitress turned away, she flounced her jacket and offered a flash of pale buttock.
James reached into the whisky bag in his lap and took out a pair of small binoculars. He turned the focusing dial and raised the binoculars to his eyes. They were pointed through the louvred window blinds at the Ace building. The kid was all business.
There was a break in the thump of the music, and the young woman on the stage gathered up a small pile of discarded clothes she'd left at one corner of the stage. She held them in front of her as she descended the stage's stairs. She managed to look decorous.
“Alarm box's over the door,” James said. He was leaning forward and pressing the binoculars against the window.
The waitress brought James' Coke and my vodka. I gave her a ten-dollar bill and got back a handful of change. The waitress paid no attention to James and the binoculars.
“Take me maybe five minutes on that box,” James said.
The rock music thudded back to life, and a well-built woman climbed up the stairs to the stage. She was dressed in a nurse's uniform: white dress, white cap, white shoes with laces and low heels.
“You want to see what I mean?” James said.
He handed me the binoculars. Above the metal and glass door in the brick wall of the Ace building, beside an overhead light, there was a square box with wires leading from both sides. The wires ran down the edges of the door and disappeared into the brick.